Rapper Ludacris Provides Ordinary Meaning of Terms

Insurance litigator John Mejia sent in news of Google’s News patent application that ranks news items based on source quality.  (Patently-O is still ranking fairly well in Google’s news listing.)  In his reporting on the topic, Ron Coleman provided the improvement of basing the quality of the source on its political affiliation. Ron also talked about the inherent boring nature of the great patent law blogs.  A non-boring court opinion was recently released in the Seventh Circuit case of US v. Murphy (04–2032).  Although Murphy is a criminal case, it provides some interesting comments regarding the meaning of terms.  Quoting from Footnote 1:

The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

In the future, if the courts needs definitions of other terms that are yet to arrive in Webster’s, they might turn to the Urban Dictionary.

File Attachment: US v. Murphy.pdf (25 KB)

Another Topic Interior Design: We have a very close family friend who is also a talented designer.  Her problem is that she is located in Manhattan, Kansas — a rising senior in the Kansas State University (KSU) interior design department — and is having some trouble finding a summer opportunity.  Any ideas or opportunities? (Shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you her resume: crouch@mbhb.com). I’ll vouch for her character and fitness (She wrote a song and sang it in my wedding when she was a middle school student).